R.E.S.P.E.C.T-- Find out What It Means to Me
Aya Terki (East Meadow High School)
“Ki wo tsukenasai!”, my mother warned, as I ran out of my grandparents’ apartment to the bookstore
down the block. I heard a clerk welcome me from the back of the store: “Irashaimase!”. I grabbed my
favorite Japanese book that I waited for months to get my hands on and dashed to the cash register. “That
will be 700 yen please”, said the cashier with a smile. I quickly pulled out seven 100-yen coins from my
jacket pocket and went to drop them into the cashier’s hand. Her smile faded and her eyes widened as she
gasped. Out of nowhere, she pulled out a small, rectangular tray and held it under my hand, apologizing
profusely. I remembered watching my mother place her money in a similar tray, so I assumed I was to do
the same thing. The cashier counted the money, gave me the receipt with my book and bowed multiple
times, embarrassed. I bowed back, and rushed back to the apartment. A bit confused, I told my okaasan
what happened in the bookstore and asked her why the cashier was so apologetic. She explained to me that
when purchasing an item in a Japanese store, the money or credit card should be placed in the tray that is
provided. It is a sign of respect, and it symbolizes that the item is worthy of being handled with care. Being
raised in America, such a way of handling money seemed silly to me. I was used to seeing crumbled up
dollar bills with mustaches drawn on President Washington’s face. I was accustomed to seeing pennies on
supermarket floors, or dimes glued on to subway seats. Such disrespect towards one’s surroundings is
frowned upon in the Japanese culture.

Respect for the environment is another quality that is emphasized in Japanese culture. Streets, subway
cars, train stations and even public toilets are clean and garbage cans are easily accessible in busy areas.

During a recent trip to Japan, I went to Tokyo DisneyLand with my family. A young child in front of me
was eating a piece of candy and dropped her wrapper. Immediately, another guest at the park picked up the
wrapper, and threw it away into a nearby garbage can. Witnessing that took me back to my studies in a
Japanese elementary school. Every day, we had “osouji no jikan,” or clean up time, and we rotated shifts to
clean the floors of the classroom, wipe desks and clean the bathroom. By doing so at a young age, we
learned to take responsibility not only for our own actions, but for others’ as well. It was an important
lesson for me to learn because back at home, I selfishly depended on custodians or sanitation workers to
pick up my garbage later. Being put into their shoes helped me realize that I should at least be accountable
for my own things, and I think many Japanese students also realize that and apply it in their daily lives. For
example, many public bathrooms do not provide paper towels because it has become customary to carry
around a handkerchief. Also, a popular movement called “My Hashi” makes it trendy to carry around your
personal pair of chopsticks. This is in place of using disposable wooden chopsticks called waribashi. These
trends encourage all kinds of people to participate in a team effort to be more eco-friendly in order to help
out and give back to the environment.

Though respect is a universal concept, why is it applied differently in other cultures? It seems as if in
American culture, respect is something we only give to people. In Japanese tradition, respecting others is
something that is shizen, or natural, but in addition to another form of respect: Respect with their
surroundings. Right now, the entire globe is facing an environmental crisis due to overuse of our natural
resources and the tremendous amount of pollution. We use things and then throw them away mindlessly,
without thinking of the consequences. Through my experiences in Japan, I’ve made a conscious effort to be
more eco-friendly myself. I use a reusable bag for grocery shopping, and I use a handkerchief instead of
paper towels. If we all learn to respect and appreciate our surroundings like the Japanese, I believe it will be
easier to help preserve our planet and keep it healthy to sustain future generations.

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Doumo Arigatou Mr. Roboto
Eric Andrew Engoron (Stony Brook University)
It isn’t easy living independently when you have a physical disability rendering you unable to walk.

Tasks as easy as making your bed become impossibly difficult. You are unable to reach things in high
places, or even change light bulbs. It is unfeasible to take showers without the proper equipment at your
disposal, and even to use the bathroom if the proper facilities aren’t available to you. Taking these
unworkable tasks into consideration, I had always wondered how I could manage life independently. I
would lay awake at night, thinking of ways I could manage my daily routine without the help of my family,
and the problem was, I could not come up with anything. I began to think I was destined to live at home
forever; I could never live independently. However, that thought could not be further from the truth.

A few months after my realization, I was still feeling down in the dumps; the world never seemed less
handicapped friendly than it did to me then. Around that same time, I made a new friend in school. His
name was Taisei Chiba, and he was an exchange student from Tokyo, Japan that had just moved to the
United States because his dad’s job was relocated. He understood written English very well, but his
listening comprehension was less than serviceable. Every day afterschool, I would sit with him and help
him with his listening and speaking, while I conversely learned a plethora of Japanese. Culturally, he was
very different than most of the people I had to deal with in my school. He was respectful, kind, and most of
all, he did not think of me as “that disabled kid,” as everyone else did. He chalked it up to the fact that I
was not different from anyone else, but I chalked it up to the respectful aspect of the Japanese culture that is
not stressed in America. Along with restoring my faith in my peers, and the people around me, Taisei also
helped me more than he could ever realize, he helped restore my hope in becoming independent.

One snowy winter Monday, when Taisei and I met afterschool, he asked me to help him understand an
article that used complex English that he never learned while in Japan. Upon reading the introduction, I
could tell that the article was about a bipedal robot that was being developed in Japan named ASIMO.

However, as I read more and more of the article, I started to fall in love with the driving force behind
ASIMO’s development, artificial intelligence. The article that Taisei gave to me talked about the
possibilities of integrating ASIMO in the home to help families go throughout their daily lives without
having to do quite as many chores. After I helped Taisei comprehend the article, and we went our separate
ways, I spent hours and hours in my room on my computer researching artificial intelligence and robotics;
particularly robots that originate in Japan.

That night, I stumbled upon an article that changed my life’s goal forever. The article, by Dennis
Normile spoke of Japan’s former Prime Minster Abe’s Innovation 25 plan, which stated that by 2025,
robotics would be integrated into many Japanese households to make life easier for humans (Normile 186).

As Abe stated in his speech, “…such an innovation will set the Japanese society ahead for years to come,”
(Abe). Prime Minster Abe’s innovation made my hopes of living independently rise exponentially. If Abe’s
innovation succeeds, I would be able to live on my own with the help of the robots that would be integrated
into my household. These robots would be able to make my bed, change light bulbs for me, reach things in
high places, and even do my laundry, if I was lucky enough! Life would be ideal for me to be independent.

During that night, and many nights to come, I sat on my computer and researched robots being developed
that would one day make me self-ruling. The robot with the most articles written about it was ASIMO, the
robot that Taisei introduced to me during that afterschool session. ASIMO is Honda’s brainchild; it is the
most advanced bipedal robot developed thus far. According to ASIMO’s chief engineer Masato Hirose,
ASIMO is designed “to improve living in human society without modifying the human living space,”
(Hirose and Ogawa 11). Such a robot sounded ideal to me. ASIMO would be able to operate in an
unmodified house, and would help me with my daily routine.

Day in and day out I would bring Taisei Japanese articles about robotics to translate for me, and the
help I was giving him soon became mutual, as I learned from him as well. While ASIMO sounded like the
perfect robot for me to have in my household, there was another robot that I researched that truly made my
jaw drop. Its name was the Hyper Assistive Limb-5 (HAL-5). The HAL-5, developed by Japanese company
Cyberdyne, is designed to help the disabled and the elderly walk. It is an exoskeleton robot that you wear to
amplify the strength in your muscles by five allowing you to be more stable while walking (Cyberdyne
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